Participation Camp 2009, an unconference held at NYU’s ITP,  is part of a broader vision of the organizers to position open government at the leading edge of an open organizations movement. For more on open organization Matt pointed me to David Johnson’s work and the Virtual Company movement, vermontvirtual.org.

Matt Cooperrider (@mattcoop on Twitter) – the initiator and main organizer, and Suresh Fernando (@sureshf), and Stephan Dohrn (@sdohrn) – who worked with Matt on the virtual aspects of the conference, share an interest in open collaboration, the intersection of collaboration and technology, and “how practices in this space can scale up to a global level.”

Matt and Suresh met as a result of their deep commitment to the social venture space (see Suresh’s paper, “On  the possibility of an open system mobilization platform”).

Stephan worked with Suresh to build the virtual strategy – choosing the tools, and working with the virtual presenters to stream them into the conference and the presenters on site who were streamed out. Stephan and Suresh are part of Radical Inclusion – an international group with 2 people in Germany, one in Seattle, one in London. Suresh is based in Vancouver, and Stephan in Brazil.

Participation Camp was both a global gathering with virtual presenters from India, Netherlands, Canada (Montreal and Vancouver), and the US; and it was an extraordinarily vibrant and focused forum for current issues in New York City and State.

Open Collab

The next step for Participation Camp is an experiment called “Open Collab” – to take the evolving ideas into a persistent space that people can stay engaged in. This is in contrast to traditional conferences that are discrete events. There is already a Participation Camp Wiki. But OpenCollab hopes to explore virtual collaboration processes on a number of levels (Google Wave, perhaps?).

“We see that there is already a healthy movement of self-organized camps and conferences all over the world, but no thread that draws them together.  Presumably many of these camps and their participants share common interests and goals, and a desire to contribute their discoveries to a larger pool of knowledge.

There is of course, no shortage of online discussion groups and wikis.  While useful, these are no replacement for the energy and excitement generated by real-time interaction.  We think that the best way to tie the world’s many camps together is to curate a series of open virtual sessions that anyone can join and be a part of.

Our experiment, with the working title “Open Collab”, begins Wednesday July 15th at 15:00 GMT in our PCamp Skype Chat.  We’ll focus on building out this concept and a community to support it.  Our long-term vision is to build a solid framework for cross-camp collaboration in time for Spring 2010, when most camps gear up.

PCamp was primarily focused on Open Government, in part because better government is necessary for improved collaboration in the face of shared challenges such as climate change, poverty, and war.  Help us take our efforts to the next level.”

This Themes doc gives a a good summary of ideas to take Virtual Participation Camp forward and questions about how to make virtual collaboration more effective.  It is an excellent frame for those interested in getting involved with the continuing virtual experiment, “Open Collab.”

There was a rich integration of virtual sessions into the ITP event with video streams that brought in remote participants from across the globe. The conversations from the Skype group chat are archived here, here, and here.  I asked Stephan why he chose Skype over say, CampFire, or even an immersive environment like OpenSim. I mentioned how useful OpenSim had been in creating Virtual HomeCamp for HomeCamp2. But I wasn’t surprised to get the response that simplicity and users’ levels of comfort with different tools were the key factors.  Although Stephan mentioned that another Radical Inclusion member, Sofia Bustamante (see Turn Up The Courage), is exploring virtual worlds for collaboration.

I recorded the three sessions I attended at ITP on Saturday: Mark Belinsky’s – audio, Gale Brewer’s audio, and Noel Hidalgo’s audio.

Mark Belinsky: OpenMyCity

The pictures opening this post are from Mark Belinsky’s session on the OpenMyCity project (pic of the session notes on the left and Mark Belinsky on the right). Mark is director of Digital Democracy (@mbelinsky Twitter).

“OpenMyCity is backed by a coalition that formed around the Pioneers conference that took place recently in New York and Amsterdam…The goal of OpenMyCity is to find the best ideas about how to make use of municipal open data by asking citizens and organizations to answer a simple fill-in-the-blank question: “If I knew ___, I could do ___.”

Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategy Labs (@corbett3000 Twitter), and the creative force behind Washington D.C.’s hugely successful Apps for Democracy, participated in the session (which followed his). Peter (picture above) brought up an interesting hypthetical framework to use an open source dating platform to create resource matching to needs:

“What we are thinking about is how in any given city or country or even globally on the net, there are people who have specific needs and there are people who can provide solutions to those needs. So it’s really sort of like a dating site analogy that we use when thinking about how to match those two for the most efficient outcome.”

Although I missed Peter’s session, I caught up with him for an interview (full transcript below) in which I asked him more about this repurposing of an open source dating platform idea, and the latest developments in Apps for Democracy.

Gale Brewer: New York City’s Open Data Legislation

NYC Council Member, Gale Brewer (@galeabrewer Twitter)

NYC Council Member Gale Brewer’s session on opening government data – Introduction No. 991-2009, gave an important explanation of the Open Data Legislation and why this effort to get raw data to the public legislatively is important (audio here – the recording is not of the highest quality but OK, and I hope to have a transcription soon).

Unfortunately, the Bloomberg administration and the Council are at odds over this now as the Bloomberg administration doesn’t appear to see the immense value of raw data over data packaged in accordance with what an administration thinks people needs (see this post on Gateway to Gov research and Discussion Blog, and John Geraci’s post on O’Reilly Radar, “Open Gov Is a Dialogue Not a Monologue.”)

Samuel Wong (@samjwong Twitter), Legislative Aide on Technology in Government, Office of Council Member Gale A. Brewer, attended Participation Camp (picture above), and is active in the virtual forums. Sam points out that Big Apps is a great idea, but cannot be implemented without open raw data from the government.

In email, I asked Sam what people could do to support the Open Data Legislation and he suggested:

“Right now, we are trying to gather information from other cities that have tried to open up their government – possibly some stats on cost-savings. The administration is worried about this.  If people can submit a brief written statement of other cities’ efforts, that’ll be helpful.

As the Administration considers a demand model for NYC Big Apps, the supply side is missing. A top-to-bottom model will be ineffective, in comparison the people-government collaboration model generates a sense of government accountability and trust.

In order to engage and collaborate with the people, the first step is to tap into the unique intellectual capital in New York City that will revitalize the private sector.  Once the government data is available, developers will competitively build applications from the raw data, which will help daily New Yorkers find the information they need.

Intro 991-2009 fosters competition among developers by supplying raw data that can be used for many purposes, including education and quality of life issues: the legislation complements NYC Big Apps, as greater results will yield from it.  Open data is a public service enhancement.

Thus, in addition to your advice and support, please participate in Apps for Democracy’s NYC Big Apps Ideas Feedback Forum [www.bit.ly/bigideas] to show your enthusiasm for more data for programmers, developers, and the daily New Yorker.”

Links from other blogs on Open Data legislation below:

http://www.politickerny.com/4271/bloomberg-administration-resists-online-mandate-citing-user-friendliness

http://nyfi.observer.com/politics/182/new-open-data-standards-legislation

http://nyfi.observer.com/politics/208/pdf-bloomberg-announces-big-apps-contest-says-dine-winner

http://personaldemocracy.com/blog-entry/nyc-council-gives-open-data-hearing

“Several notable individuals” participated in the discussion on Open Data which as Lou Klepner noted,  in his post, included but was certainly not limited to, Andrew Hoppin (CIO, NYS Senate), Noel Hidalgo (Director of Technology, NYS Senate, ), Steven Clift (Founder, e-democracy.org), Silona Bonewald (Founder, Legal of Technical Voters), and Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist.org).”

Craig Newmark (@craignewmark Twitter) brought up some vital questions concerning how we can raise public awareness around the Open Data Legislation.  I had a quick chat with Craig after the session.  I was surprised and happy to see him playing such an active role in a small unconference.

Tish Shute: I noticed Gale Brewer was very enthusiastic just now about some of your recent work -  there was a boot camp I think? What is that?

Craig Newmark: Something that the Craigslist foundation does is to run a boot camp. The idea is to help people who want to help to be more effective at it. Focusing on non-profits. For example, last week one theme was to help people present what they’re doing more effectively. Because if you don’t – if you can’t tell someone what you’re doing in 30 to 60 seconds, they’re going to start tuning out. There’s also grant writing issues if you’re a foundation or a non-profit of some sort. And then there’s the effective use of technology. The idea is that if the bootcamp can help give someone a clue about any of those, that can make life much easier for someone who’s trying to help other people.

There is a nice short video here about Craig Newmark’s commitment to Gov 2.0, also see his blog.

Andrew Hoppin and Noel Hidalgo: nysenate.gov

Andrew Hoppin (@ahoppin Twitter) – pic above, was an active contributor to the discussion on OpenData. His team seems to have survived the upheavals in Albany to continue their innovative work on nysenate.gov that now allows “constituents to give direct feedback to Senators on proposed bills, hearings and issues in “crowdsourcing portals” for property taxes, ethics reform and campaign finance,”(see here for more, and also see my post on the work of Nathan Freitas the great developer for this team).

Director of Technology,  NYS Senate, Noel Hidalgo (@noneck Twitter) – picture below, led the excellent session on nysenate.gov (audio here).

More on Virtual Participation Camp

This week I got a chance, through the PCamp Skype group, to follow up with Suresh, Stephan and Matt (picture above of Matt Cooperrider participating in Gale Brewer’s session).  One of the topics I was interested in hearing more about was the Twitter and Iran Workshop that was part of the ITP program. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend in person.

I was interested in following up on some of the issues raised in my previous post, Twitter and The Web of Flow: Talking with Stowe Boyd & Bruce Sterling about Microsyntax, Squelettes, Favela Chic and the State of Now.

Matt noted that the centralized hijacking was taken as a given and the question was:

1. how do we get more reports out despite that

2. how do we aggregate/filter those reports

But, he also noted, the group at hand was less interested in a specific solution and got philosophical pretty quickly.  What is our goal with these interventions? To support people’s right to democracy?

Matt explained:

“I was pushing a project described here: http://votereport.pbworks.com/Iran-Election but the more experienced folks seemed to think it was too late for a solution like that but everyone pretty much agreed that the main goal was to get something like that ready for the “next one:” someone, Noel I think, suggested an international ICT “Red Cross” style organization.”

One of the virtual presenters at Participation Camp was Gaurav Mishra (@gauravonomics Twitter), the founder of 20:20 Web Tech, Votereport.in, and a leader in India’s Gov2.0 scene.

Stef Van Grieken (@stefvangrieken), New Voting Foundation also presented on the use of electoral compasses to identify key candidates for parliament in the Netherlands.

“The application matches candidates to voters based on the party program’s and individual political views.”

Ed Pastore (@epastore), Metagovernment, delivered a talk entitled, “Making Direct Democracy Practical,” outlining the drawbacks of representative democracy in various contexts; and exploring the historical criticisms of direct democracy and detailing, “several emerging projects which are actively working to overcome the limitations of direct (or otherwise more inclusive) democracy by applying sophisticated web technologies.”

And, Gabriel Flacks, Newsactivist and teacher at Champlain College in Montreal, Quebec, gave a talk entitled “Teaching Participation: the Newsactivist Curriculum.”

Talking With Peter Corbett

Tish Shute: What do I think are the most important apps for democracy to come out so far?

Peter Corbett: Well I won’t say what the most important are, because I think all of the ones created in the first round last year and the ones that are being developed now are important in some way shape or form. I’ll say what the most interesting were, and which were the ones that won medals.

So “ilive.at” won the gold medal in Apps for Democracy last October. What it does is, you put in your address and it basically forms the world around you. And you can see where crimes happened and where the post office is, and where the grocery store is. It’ll also show you an overlay of U.S. census data, to show you sort of the composition of that neighborhood – so what’s the average age, what’s the ethnicity, the composition from a married/single perspective.

The city thought it was really great and that it could help people decide where to move, and what that place looked like if they were in a certain sector of the city. Another really interesting application that was developed was “We the People Wiki,” and if you go to wethepeoplewiki.com you can see it. What it does is it creates all in one place all the information around crime you can imagine for a specific case. So if there was a homicide, you can see who the community prosecuter is, who the defender is.  You can see the ward within which it happened mapped, the specific address where it happened mapped. Also realtime data will stream up showing the last 5 homicides in that area – trying to identify, “Are there some trends around this thing, etc.?” So those are two interesting cool apps that were created.

In this new edition, Apps for Democracy “Community Edition, amongst the applications we’ve seen entered, there’s one that is essentially an iPhone application that lets you walk around the city and geolocate yourself so it’ll show you you’re on this street corner and you can take a picture of a pothole, upload it to the 311 service request system, and then hit “send to facebook,” and it publishes to your social profile, and people see that you’re concerned about this stuff.  And what that does is it creates little social hooks to get your friends to say, “Oh I can do this too and I should do this too.”  So we start to build a better view of what the problems are in the city, so that the city can then take care of them.

I think the promise of something like that is building an additional layer on top of it later, maybe where citizens would be empowered to solve some of these problems themselves. Because some of the things that get entered won’t really be things the city can take care of. Certainly litter is within the perview of the citys’ responsibility, but could there be community organizations who take care of things like that if you start to see trends in certain places of having a lot of requests around that.

There’s a last application I’ll talk about in this community edition, it’s called “PointAbout”. What it does is it builds an interactive map of all the vacant properties in the district which happen to be havens for drug abusers and possibly dangerous areas at night and things like that. Building that is really important. It’s really hard right now to do that in the city because it’s a lot of footwork and paperwork. So citizens themselves can identify addresses when they’re out and about and say this is a vacant property. It’ll make DC a safer place.

Tish: So have you seen the Sprx Mobile app “Layar,” an augmented reality browser?

Peter: I have seen that. It’s very cool. I think augmented reality is A the present and B the future. So it’ll be very cool to see augmented reality applications developed for DC in the future. Or anywhere, I’m very DC centric obviously. I live there and DC’s my client.

Dimitry Kachiev who’s the director of research and development for the city of Washington DC, just released an API actually that will show you in realtime the location of DC’s circulator buses. The circulator buses only go inside DC and are therefore not owned and operated by WAMATA which is metropolitan area transit authority, which won’t release their realtime data. So looking at Google Earth you can literally see the buses moving around the map. I use the circulator. I live 5 blocks from the line, but I never know when to leave my building to go to it. And now I can go, “Oh I see bus number 1150 is 5 blocks down, I might as well start walking now. Because then I’ll intersect it.”

There’s no live application. There’s just a data feed. But it can be visualized on Google Earth. And if you go to api.dc.gov you’ll see the beta API for that feed. So then you just click it, load it into Google Earth, and you’ll see the busses moving around.

Tish: I was fascinated by the idea you mentioned to use an open source dating platform to create resource matching to needs. But I didn’t quite pick up whether you actually built something yet?

Peter: No that is a hypothetical framework that we haven’t really put to the test yet. What we are thinking about is how in any given city or country or even globally on the net, there are people who have specific needs and there are people who can provide solutions to those needs. So it’s really sort of like a dating site analogy that we use when thinking about how to match those two for the most efficient outcome.

So think about males being people who have needs maybe females as being providers or something. So when you login and create your profile, you say I can provide this stuff. I’m a web developer, I’m a designer, I’m a great carpenter, I can transport food to places. and then what the needs are. We need food, we need web design, we need whatever, here’s our location. I’m not currently married, I’m single. So going into the system an algorhythm would say OK based on the need, and based on the provider, Peter Corbitt should provide web design to this non-profit because A it’s 2 blocks away from him, B he’s not on a project right now, C they’re not currently being satisfied with that need. Matched.

Tish: How is that different from what Mechanical Turk’s doing other than the payment thing?

Peter: I think there’s a lot of differences. Mechanical Turk is really just paying for specific actions in a discrete period of time. I want ten thousand people to click this link ten thousand times.
So the dating site analogy is extended when assuming that this need is fullfilled there was a discrete need like we just need 20 loaves of bread, well great done that need is gone. The need is gone out of the system, the matching doesn’t happen again. But if it’s an ongoing need like elderly care or afterschool tutoring, when that marraige is broken, when there’s a divorce, that needer goes back into the matching system to be rematched. Everywhere it happens, someone has a volunteer for a specific thing at a non-profit, they lose that volunteer, they have to go back and get a new one and it’s just an ongoing process. If you automate that it’ll be much more efficient. You’ll get more done.

Tish: How is that different from what the The Extraordinaries does?

Peter: The Extraordinaries concept I think is similar to a certain extent. The concept is very cool. So the it’s probably a little synonymous.

Their concept is a mobile micro volunteering thing, which is terrific. And I look forward to using it. I don’t know yet that they’ve gotten their application developed and approved?

Tish: You work for a very busy marketing company, how do you fit this all in? Where does it all fit? How do you monetize it? How do you keep it together?

Peter: Sure. I’m the CEO of iStrategy Labs, and 95% of our revenue comes from brands like Geico, American Eagle Outfitters, Rockstar folks like that, that pay us to do cool weird things with marketing technology. The D.C. government is our client, and pays us to create cool new things like apps for democracy.

Tish: So the D.C. government pays you to do Apps for Democracy?

Peter: That’s right. So we created the concept, and execute it and run it and champion it. Apps for Democracy is a way to engage citizen technologists in building applications for their city, by incentivising them with a little bit of fame, and a little bit of fortune.

Tish: But it’s basically D.C. based?

Peter: Nope. Yes and no.  It’s focused on applications for the city of Washington D.C. The first round that we had last year, 80% of the applications were developed by D.C. based people, I should say the greater D.C. area so D.C., Maryland, Virginia. The other 20% came from California, Massecussets, North Carolina, from specific hackers that like to work on this kind of stuff. There’s an Apps for Democracy Finland, there’s an Apps for Democracy Belgium. It’s spreading as an idea, as a way to do things differently. And those aren’t paid consulting engagements that we have for iStrategy Labs.

I give that insight away freely because I want people to do it. I think it’s the right way to do things. And it certainly helps our initiative be more well known and give us more impact when we do something.

Tish: And you mentioned you’re very involved with Government 2.0 camps and O’Reilly’s upcoming Government 2.0 Expo, and Government 2.0 Summit?

Peter: I’m on the programming committee for Government 2.0 Expo. Government 2.0 Summit I just sort of help promote a little bit. Government 2.0 Camp I co-created with 3 other individuals, and Government 2.0 club I co-created, and Transparency Camp.

Game Play and Collaboration

A collaborative sculpture (pic above) emerged at Participation Camp, also a game of Nomic

“Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.”

—Peter Suber, the creator of Nomic, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, Appendix 3, p. 362.

Also there was a linkcube unit stationed at ITP throughout the conference, but unfortunately I didn’t have a moment to check it out.  Linkcube is part of the 80+1 project.

“Using real-time data exchange, the users, who are geographically distant, are presented on screen as if they were right next to each other. This closeness lets users get momentarily acquainted with other humans to whom they would not otherwise be exposed. What results is a set of playful interactions and the ultimate photographs serve as a tangible record of this memorable virtual experience.”

Tim O’Reilly has outlined some of the world’s big problems in his talks, and urged technologists to “work on stuff that matters.” I was one of O’Reilly’s listeners at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC (see my post here).

But, I found out at the Head Conference in London, recently, that O’Reilly is doing more than just talking about solving the world’s problems. The O’Reilly VC company is investing in technologies that tackle these big problems, for example, a very interesting startup, AMEE.

AMEE is a new company with a VERY big, world changing idea – “to create  a neutral technology platform to aggregate all the energy consumption data in world ” – “to be the world’s energy meter.”

I was fortunate, when I was in London, to get an opportunity to chat with Tim O’Reilly about AMEE, Web 2.0, and the role of virtual worlds in positive global development. Also, I met the CEO of AMEE, Gavin Starks.

We are still, just, in the pre “Internet of Things” era.  But, soon, as Bruce Sterling puts it, we will be able to “Google our shoes” or find out which super market shelves are out of sandwiches at any particular point in time! But for now, it can still be very hard to find a sandwich, even in central London. So, I had plenty of time to talk to Tim O’Reilly whilst searching for a hand held bite to eat.

We journeyed past several sandwichless restaurants (Tim picked up the Financial Times under his arm in the picture above in one of them), and super markets with shelves stripped bare except for some end of the day sushi (it looked scary so we passed on that).

Finally, McDonalds came through for us with the sandwich in the top left corner of the photo above.  The full interview is later in this post.

First, more about AMEE.

Tim O’Reilly says he doesn’t like predicting the future. But the future comes to Tim O’Reilly in very powerful ways.  And AMEE asks us to play a new proactive role in our own future. AMEE’s call to action is:

“If all the energy data in the world were accessible, what would you build?”

AMEE, to me, is a quintessential example of an effort to harness the key paradigm shifts of Web 2.0 (see O’Reilly, “What is Web 2.0?“) to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems.

AMEE’s mission is to be a neutral technology platform, using open source and standards, and an architecture of participation, to address the need to standardize measurement, encourage collaborative development, and create a market place for energy data.

AMEE’s goal is to enable us to understand energy consumption from the level of the individual to the scale of whole countries.

This would address the need O’Reilly notes here his son-in-law Saul Griffith argued at Emerging Technology Conference earlier this year:  “to pick a target CO2 concentration and work backwards to get to an energy policy, rather than guessing at an energy policy with fingers crossed, hoping for a climate outcome that is tolerable.” AMEE is also involved in Saul’s Wattzon initiative.

Gavin Starks, CEO, AMEE, (pictured above standing under the Head Conference banner – a recording of his talk is here), explained:

AMEE’s vision is to aggregate all the energy data on Earth. By energy I include electricity, gas and all types of fuel, water, waste, you name it: everything we do is energy consumption, which means really building towards our sustainability footprint rather than just our carbon footprint. The initial thing we’ve focused on is Carbon and CO2, because that’s the most pressing issue we have to face: but it’s quite a thin layer on top of the whole sustainability question.

AMEE is not building the front-end applications to harness this energy data. Gavin noted:

We’re aggregating all the standards. This is a massively complex area, so we’ve got a science team whose job is to harvest all the scientific research and methodologies. That’s not something developers tend to want to go anywhere near: it unpacks itself into enormous amounts of complexity very quickly (e.g. building methodologies that have 700 data points).  Our Chief Scientific Officer, Dr Andrew Conway, is ex-NASA and has worked on massive scientific data analysis.

We aggregate government standards and other international standards, so that you know when you’re integrating with us, that you’re working to those standards. But much more than that we actually publish those standards on an open Wiki (the Wiki and the API actually talk to each other). As these standards emerge and evolve, we’ll be tracking them, ensuring that we are up to date, and granularity is added as needed.

We were very fortunate that one of our first clients was Defra which UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Defra is currently restructuring into DEC – the Department for Energy and Climate Change. So in the UK they’re actually fusing Energy and Climate Change into a single government department. I think this is quite remarkable: a giant step forward.

We were contracted by them because they were building a national campaign to raise the awareness of every citizen’s personal and household footprint, and they were looking for an Open Source solution – which AMEE is. Defra/DEC now use AMEE for two purposes: they make their standards available through the AMEE platform, so that everybody else can use them, and as the back-end solution to their national campaign, “Act on CO2″.

AMEE is SaaS – a web-service API – we’re not trying to compete with anyone on the front-end development and delivery. Because we aggregate two moving targets: standards and consumption, we enable those integrated with us to be current at all times.

Who Owns the Data?

But, if AMEE hopes to harness global network effects as a neutral aggregator of energy consumption data from individuals, businesses, and governments, one of the key questions that AMEE must answer (also a key question for Web 2.0 in general) is: Who owns the data?  I have delved into this question before on Ugotrade. See David Levine’s conversation with Eben Moglen on privacy here.

Gavin told me that this is a question AMEE has given a lot of thought to.

How AMEE answers this question, Who owns the data?, will probably determine the success of their mission as an ethical endeavor,  and their ability to scale and leverage the network effects of the internet as a platform while still allowing ” a very granular level of energy activity to be tracked.”

Gavin explained where AMEE is going re their approach to this issue. And, how this relates to AMEE’s business model – software as a service (SaaS).

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to approach this, from both a commercial perspective and an ethical perspective.

We’re in a position where we’re aggregating vast amounts of personal and business information, on an ongoing basis. If we were to integrate with your credit cards, your smart meter, your supermarket, and your vehicles: we actually know everything about your life. Aside from the Data Protection issues we felt, “How could we protect everybody around ‘excessive’ exploitation of that data and ensure the user has long-term control?”.

As the saying goes, “we don’t know what we don’t know”: when it comes to predicting what our privacy issues will be, and as the data around our physical lives becomes digitally available, we wanted to err on the side of caution. Danny O’Brien, the EFF and MySociety have certainly helped to shape our thinking in this respect.

So if you’re a Google user and you go into the Google and you kick off a calculation, all your answers to the questions are stored in AMEE – but we don’t know who you are. We’ve got an anonymous key, Google’s got the anonymous key. Google will have your user name and so on and so forth. In AMEE we’ve got the aggregate of the responses to the questions. It’s up to Google’s Privacy Policy to determine what they and their user’s can do.

However, this doesn’t preclude us from enabling data-portability on behalf of the user. The anonymous key is not dissimilar to an OpenID, but applied to a specific data set. We are heading towards allowing you to control your data’s portability, as an individual.

It’s a fragile space. We want to give you the opportunity to glue together your AMEE IDs with your OpenID, or whatever login you choose, so that you’re in control. We aim to enable this to be both cloud and edge-based, which while fragile, is in the interest of the user. The more value we can provide, we believe, the stronger the value of our proposition.

But, because were dealing with a range of different massive organizations … imagine credit card companies sharing data with energy companies sharing data with petrol companies, sharing data with airlines etc. That’s a massive challenge from a business and political perspective – almost impossible to navigate.

We can enable people to collaborate, by making it opt-in all the way through the chain. We don’t undermine peoples existing databases: we can actually add value to them, or we aim to add value to them. We think this has got a huge amount of potential to stimulate new business for our clients.

It’s very “web” in its execution: we are part of an ecosystem. Part of our imperative is to be commercially enabling to everybody else. If we’re not being commercially enabling to other people, we’re not going to get the kind of scale of change that we need.

This was another design feature. We felt, “how could we create something which other people could build businesses or platforms on top of”?  And, how could that scale incredibly quickly? If we’d gone beyond our boundaries as an API, we would have been competing with people we want to work with.

While many services have taken similar strategic approaches, most seem to start with a form of lock-in, or evolve quickly to the point of lock-in, which satisfies a current trend in their valuations. We believe this trend will change and adapt to a more “privacy-based” intelligence, which has substantial value.

Tim O’Reilly in The Magic Circle

The motto of The Magic Circle where the Head Conference was held, “Indocilis Privata Loqui,” can be roughly translated as “not apt to disclose secrets.”  One of the wonderful displays of memorabila there was Robert Houdin’s Mystery Clock (picture below).  Luckily, for me, I was was treated to a full explanation of the “Mystery Clock” by another attendee during the Head Conference cocktail party.

As Tim O’Reilly pointed out, in his interview with Aral Balkan, he felt it was a privilege to be talking in this theater and center of magic.  Capturing the magic, spreading the magic, and sharing the magic is at the heart of what he has spent his career doing.  He explained:

I guess this is kind of a root idea for O’Reilly…… When I look back on my career….What did we really do?  Find cool people who were doing cool shit. They didn’t really need any help from us. But then there were a bunch of people who were saying, “How did they do that”? Those are the people we help.

We find the people who are doing what appears to be magic. The Arthur C. Clarke kind of magic you know…. We document – we teach people how to do it.

It is such a great  privilege to be here in a theater devoted to magic – The Magic Circle. This is really what we try to do.  We try to capture the magic, spread the magic, share it with other people.

Interview With Tim O’Reilly

Tish Shute: I was interested in your comment on Chris Brogan’s blog post the other day.

Tim O’Reilly: Actually it wasn’t Chris Brogan’s post. Dennis Howlett was a guest blogger. I was reacting to him saying there is nothing new in Web 2.0. My reaction was: “Well gosh it’s very easy to make a straw man out of Web 2.0 and say, ‘What’s new?’”

Howlett was specifically reacting to the Web 2.0 start ups that are superficial and not really what the trend is all about.  For me, Web 2.0 is about the internet becoming a platform. Does he think that is over?

And, it is about understanding that the rules of business change when the internet is a platform. I think a lot of people do that with Web 2.0 [make it a straw man].

They don’t like the term Web 2.0 and they attach ideas to it that reflect the most superficial elements. And then, they say these aren’t interesting. And, what he was saying was that there is a lot of superficial social media stuff – consumer apps, and what really matters is what will bring ROI to business.

I just said that he is totally missing the point because learning how to use the network as a platform matters very much to business. The same rules that apply to everyone else apply to businesses.

So, for example, I have made the point in my talk in New York, just a few months ago, that in many ways you can think of Walmart as a Web 2.0 company. They are infused with IP – they are taking the data that the users give them by buying things and making themselves a more responsive organization by using that data.

That is the heart of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Not, do they use social media or not, or the social media buzz words.

Tish Shute: I am going to do an interview with Gavin Starks, CEO of AMEE. Could you tell me about your role in this project?

Tim O’Reilly: My role is as an investor. Our venture firm, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, has just finished closing on investment in AMEE. We think global warming is a really important issue to come to grips with. And, a big part of it is actually keeping track of all the carbon we’re emitting. AMEE helps with that problem.

Tish Shute: What is the potential, now we are beginning to break virtual world technologies down into basic open source building blocks, to create useful mashups with sensor technology, Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds? Could Virtual Worlds play a key role in this work of instrumenting the world?

Tim O’Reilly: First of all, I don’t think that Virtual Worlds in the Second Life style will have this role …while I like the concept of Second Life, in that we have a Second Life in a virtual world, I am not sure that 3D avatars are [the way to go]…. at least they are certainly not my Second Life.  My Second Life is in other types of media.

But, when I look at this idea of instrumenting the world, one of the things that is very, very clear is that we are turning all the millions of consumer cameras into sensors.

For example, Microsoft’s Photosynth demonstrates how these consumer sensors can be used to build 3D models. We are starting to build a 3D representation of the real world, not a separate virtual world. And, we are all going to be part of that world. So I think that the real Second Life will be ………..well I think the first layer is going to be….to get the 3D models of the world as it is, and then we will have doorways into additional rooms and additional spaces.

That’s when its going to take off because people are going to get used to it through navigating the real physical world with maps – with 3D imagery of buildings and spaces.

And, another piece of this… I talked recently with Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk……and he was talking about how much even the Autodesk workflow is shifting to scanning things first.

He was describing how they have built this new demo center in an old building.  The first thing they did was photographs and measure it exactly. Then they go and make stuff that fits in the exact space.

Also, he was talking about how in his own hobbyist work, he found this shark’s jaw and he loved the curve of it.  So he scanned it and made it into the arms of a chair.

Tish Shute: I think the two important pieces that might come out of virtual worlds technology are the real time interactions where people can view the same application or context as and when you do, and the rapid prototyping.

Tim O’Reilly: Yes rapid prototyping, no question. But, as I said, the idea of moving an avatar around isn’t very compelling to be quite honest.

Tish Shute: But the web doesn’t do real time interaction very well does it?

Tim O’Reilly: Well Twitter is doing a pretty good job!

Tish Shute: Yes I love Twitter. But, in terms of if you want to get a 10,000 foot view and gather around and interact with data with other people…..what about that?

Tim O’Reilly: Well that’s true. I am using that example of the Squeak based virtual world that Fidelity is using. And, that is exactly what they are using it for – business interaction.

Tish Shute: What about the role Virtual Worlds might play, for example, in instrumenting the world through facilities management?

Tim O’Reilly: Yes, SAP did a very interesting project on property management – and that is interesting.

Tish Shute: Yes, on my way back to New York City tomorrow, I am going to stop off in Zurich and visit Oliver Goh who worked with Denis Browne, SAP, on that project. In fact you showed a picture of Oliver’s Goh’s avatar demoing the virtual counterpart to his instrumented Playmobile house in Second Life in your post, “SAP as a Web 2.0 Company?” (see the picture below).

Tim O’Reilly: I make no attempt at predicting the future.  So you could well be right that Virtual Worlds will be a very powerful tool.  But, I think with the pace that other technologies are progressing, we will get there with photorealism and video, etc.  I think the fundamental problem in most virtual world stuff is the idea of the avatar.

Tish Shute: Why do you say that?

Tim O’Reilly: Well just imagine if when interacting with people in the real world you had to look at yourself interacting with someone else.  First person point of view is our fundamental experience.  And, you are being forced to see yourself in the third person.

Tish Shute: I have always been more interested in avataring the world than in my avatar identity.

Tim O’Reilly: There is something very interesting in having an avatar that you don’t ever see.

[At this point there were less than ten minutes before Tim's interview for the Head Conference, so it was time to concentrate on eating!]

Virtual Worlds: Where Web Meets World

As Ian Hughes, IBM, notes in a recent post on Eightbar:

The last few days have seen a plethora of virtual world pitches, reports, articles and blog posts around certain types of virtual world platform. The first was over at @monkchips a.k.a James Governor analyst blog around a visit to Microsoft to see about the ESP platform. This appears to be a high fidelity simulation platform and toolkit. The second was widely reported. But Wagner’s New World Notes is the one most of the metarati will have read on the matter. This centres around some statments by Craig Mundie that avatar based interaction was of limited interest and really it was photosynth that was the way forward, modelling the real world from photos…….

I agree with Ian when he says:

the interesting thing here is that all the discussion is not about why would anyone want a virtual world, but instead what sort is best.

Tim O’Reilly was not questioning, in my view, that we are moving towards new understandings of virtual spaces or virtual worlds but whether avatar based virtual worlds will be the most useful model.

I began my questions to Tim O’Reilly by bringing up his comment on Dennis Howlett’s post not only because he succinctly states there what is really important about Web 2.0, i.e., “internet as platform, and the rise of applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.”

But also, this comment caught my attention because Tim used virtual worlds as one of the examples of the value of Web 2.0 to enterprise.  He wrote:

Guess what : they [SAP] understand that harnessing users is good for their business. At O’Reilly, our InPractice division is working with them to actually turn their documentation into an open source, crowdsourced project. They are doing fascinating experiments at SAP Labs with how to integrate virtual worlds into property management. They have built a great internal social network for employees that has already affected their HR practices.

It is Oliver Goh’s instrumented virtual house in Second Life that Tim mentions in his post “SAP as a Web 2.0 Company?” to make the point that:

This prototype is also very on trend with one of the big ideas we have about where Web 2.0 is going, towards Web 2.0 applications that are fed directly by sensors, so that “participation” no longer just means typing on a keyboard, but the accidental information we create “merely in living as and where we live.”

I have been blogging Oliver’s work prototyping various use cases for virtual worlds in facilities management and energy optimization, e.g., virtual operations centers, in Second Life and OpenSim, since its inception (see here and here).

Now, Oliver has developed a complete solution for sustainabililty in the real estate industry that optimizes energy consumption through the entire life cycle of properties - see here for more.

Also, look out for some interesting intersections between AMEE’s mission – ” to create the world’s energy meter,” and Oliver’s mission to “optimize the world’s energy usage” in the future!

I visited Oliver in Zurich on my way back to NYC from the Head Conference.  In the picture below, Oliver is standing by the Playmobile house that is RL counterpart to the virtual control center house pictured above!

The ability of virtual worlds to play a role in solving the world’s pressing problems is, in my view, linked both to their ability to fully integrate in Web 2.0 and “real” world  data.

I have been blogging a lot on these issues!  Rob Smart, IBM, (see my recent interviews with Rob here and here – “Web 2.0 to OpenSim Made Easy”) has been doing some very interesting work recently integrating JSON support to OpenSim. This is one of the recent important steps forward in virtual world to real world communication.  See this cool video, “OpenSim Meets MQTT jedi mind numbers.”

The powerful value add that virtual worlds, even in a basic form, have shown in the realm of social media that “the people with you can view the changing states of that application or context as and when you do” can also play an important role in the front end applications for projects like AMEE and Oliver’s work.

This is not to discount the role of social media virtual worlds in the participatory work of instrumenting our planet. There is already  a nice integration of AMEE  with Second Life. See Jim Purbrick’s Carbon Goggle’s for Second Life here.

Carbon Goggles from Jim Purbrick on Vimeo

But, if virtual world technology is going be part of the evolving power of the internet to help us solve the big problems facing humanity, there must be an evolving vision for virtual worlds and their relationship with the “real” world.

Most likely, many of the dichotomies, e.g., the notion of avatar based or non avatar based, or simulation versus augmentation, and mirror worlds versus virtual worlds, will increasingly dissolve as all these aspects of virtual reality are woven together into the fabric of everday computing to form new digital/physical realities. And, while I’m not trying to predict the future, perhaps, this will happen sooner than we think!